Equipment racks and enclosures for housing electronics help to integrate a variety of different types of equipment including servers, networking equipment, power supplies, storage systems and other electronics equipment, as well as help to configure and manage an IT environment. Availability and flexibility with respect to configuring a rack environment and, in particular, with respect to reconfiguring or relocating an installed rack are essential for efficient and practical management of equipment rooms and data centers. In many instances, equipment racks and enclosures are not fully configured from top to bottom with rack-mounted components, resulting in vacant sections of an equipment area defined by the rack or enclosure. Typically, blanking panels are attached to mounting flanges or rails of a rack or enclosure to block or fill-in such sections lacking equipment.
Prior art blanking panels generally include panels configured to attach to mounting flanges or rails of a rack or enclosure with fasteners such as screw and nut combinations. Proper installation of a number of blanking panels during configuration of an equipment rack can be inconvenient, time-consuming and difficult as a result of the number of screw and nut combinations that need to be manipulated to attach or to remove several blanking panels.
Prior art blanking panels may be configured with a height of several U; however, large blanking panels do not necessarily provide convenience or flexibility with respect to configuring and rearranging an equipment rack. While the coverage provided by large blanking panels gives end-users an incentive to use large panels in populating a rack, when these panels are removed to reconfigure a rack, end-users would need to locate and install a sufficient number of smaller blanking panels that collectively measure the exact U height required to fill-in the vacant spaces, created as a result of removing large blanking panels, and/or installing, removing or rearranging equipment components. Installation of blanking panels to reconfigure or rearrange a rack can be similarly time-consuming and difficult.
Other prior art designs permit blanking panels to be installed into a rack or enclosure without the use of tools or hardware. However, such prior art panel designs are configured primarily for aesthetic purposes in order for panels to conform to the external appearance of installed equipment components. Such blanking panels are not configured, for instance, to reduce or eliminate gaps between installed blanking panels and equipment components and, therefore, have little or no effect in preventing mixing of hot exhaust air with cooling air within a rack. Any effect such designs have on air circulation is minimal and merely consequential.
Many blanking panels are constructed in whole or in part of metal. Such designs are relatively expensive to manufacture and to ship. In addition, metal blanking panels are prone to scratching and other surface abrasion, and can be easily bent during shipping, handling and installation.